Picking a Domain

Connect yourself to something important#

“BTW, are you chafing for career advancement, or want to be seen as a leader by your peers? My stock advice is, find an area that is important but under-owned and become everyone’s go-to expert on that topic.”

- Charity Majors

You don’t need to get too creative with this one. You want to connect yourself to something important:

• Consider something people deal with daily but don’t really think about too much (especially if they know they are leaving something on the table, like airline points — it’s easy to make money by helping people unlock free money).
• Maybe choose something people only deal with once in a blue moon, but when they do, it REALLY hurts (so you gain unfair expertise by specializing in having repeated exposure to rare events across multiple customers).

Look out for something you love#

To narrow these down, even more, look out for something you disproportionately love. Look for your own revealed preferences: Search a topic in Slack or Twitter and see how often you talk about it. Look up your own YouTube watch history. An ideal domain for you is something that seems like work to others but is fun to you.

With everything you love, there are things to hate. Find something within what you love that you are ABSURDLY unsatisfied with. That love-hate tension can fuel you for years.

For any important enough problem, there are plenty of experts. Do you feel like you haven’t narrowed enough? Shrink your world. Be an internal expert at your company for your domain. This also helps you focus on things that bring value to a company, and therefore your career. It’s also a very natural onramp to being an external expert when you leave.

Claiming your domain#

Picking your domain is 90% of the journey. Most people don’t even get that far. To really clean up, be prolific around that domain. Show up to every conversation. I call this “High Availability for Humans”. In the same way, we architect our systems for “high availability”, meaning we can send everything their way because they are very reliable and responsive, we can make ourselves highly available around our chosen domain, meaning everyone can send questions our way because we are very reliable and responsive.

By showing up consistently, you become part of the consideration set. Humans don’t have room for a very wide consideration set. It’s usually two or three. If we make lists and try really hard, we can get up to ten (see the Oscars), but even then, there are really only two or three that have a real shot.

Make it into everyone’s consideration set#

Think about the last time you purchased soap. You probably buy one of two brands of soap. But there are one hundred on the shelves. They just weren’t in your consideration set, so they never had a chance.

As a brand, your goal is to make it into everyone’s consideration set. You do that by being highly available.

Availability bias#

By the way, we also have huge availability bias when it comes to recall. We conflate “top of mind” with “being the best.”

It’s your job to be the best at what you do (and to define what that means), but don’t stop there. It’s also entirely within your control to be considered the best, which is what claiming your domain is all about.

Give up freedom — for now#

The flip side of planting your flag is that you shouldn’t plant it anywhere else. People like to see commitment. It implies and usually does mean that you have no choice but to be a domain expert. You signal a commitment by giving up optionality. This is 100% okay-- what you lose in degrees of freedom, you gain ten times in marketing ability.

Author’s note: Ten times may be an understatement. Cory House saw a fifteen times increase in inquiries when he went from “general dev consulting” to “helping teams transition to React.” Same dev, different pitch, fifteen times opportunities.

You can pivot your domain#

The secret is — and don’t tell anyone — that if you pick a domain and it doesn’t work out, you can still pivot if you need to. Nobody’s going to hold it against you, as long as you don’t pivot too often.

If you really aspire toward more general prominence, you will find a much easier time of it if you first prove yourself in a single domain.